


a you and me kind of thing

by narada-talis (sarensen)



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Alternate Universe - Soulmates, Angst with a Happy Ending, Canon Compliant, Established Adam/Shiro (Voltron), Fluff, Keith (Voltron) is Bad at Feelings, Light Angst, M/M, Pre-Canon, Pre-Kerberos Mission, Pre-Relationship, Soulmate-Identifying Marks, events leading up to s01e01
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-08
Updated: 2019-03-08
Packaged: 2019-11-13 21:08:37
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,042
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18039077
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sarensen/pseuds/narada-talis
Summary: Keith has never believed in soulmates, and he's not about to start now. So when he sees his matching soul mark on Shiro's arm, he fights against it tooth and nail until he's convinced himself he's free. Until Shiro disappears and everyone tells him he died, and everything changes...Excerpt:Recognition jolts through Shiro’s body like lightning. He grips Keith’s arm and sits up, staring at him in bewilderment. “You…”Keith can only nod, the thousand things he’s wanted to say to Shiro over the past year getting stuck in his throat:I’m sorry I hid it from youandI love you so muchandI am incomplete without you.Shiro seems to understand anyway, by the way he clutches Keith to his chest. They stay that way for minutes, hours, Keith doesn’t know how long and he doesn’t care. The only thing that matters is that Shiro is here with him.





	a you and me kind of thing

**Author's Note:**

  * For [taikodragon](https://archiveofourown.org/users/taikodragon/gifts).



Keith has never believed in soulmates. It may be true that everyone in the universe has one - even Keith, as attested by the mark on the inside of his forearm - but Keith has always felt… different. Cold. Where other people yearn for their soulmates, even go on life-changing journeys of discovery to find them, Keith has never felt that need, that drive.

He has at times doubted whether he’s even capable of love. He’s just not good with people, and he’s been made aware of that fact over and over again. Now, he pushes people away before they get a chance to get close. It’s safer that way. Besides, he’s perfectly functional on his own. He’s consistently at the top of his class. He wins all the illegal hoverbike races the older kids at his school have late at night behind the old diner. And he never has to rely on anyone else for anything.

So life is good, and he fully intends on never falling in love, soul marks be damned.

That plan goes straight to hell the day he meets Shiro.

He’s staring out of the classroom window in boredom when it happens. As far as he’s concerned, Takashi Shirogane is just another Garrison recruiter, another rejection for Keith to add to his list. But there’s something about his voice, about the gentle way he phrases words, that makes Keith look up.

It’s a mistake.

He can suddenly feel his heart beating in his throat, hard enough that he can’t breathe. His chest aches with an almost palpable need to get up and go to him. He  _needs_  to be close to him, and he doesn’t understand why.

 _Oh no_.

He turns to stare out of the window with a determined frown.

_No. Absolutely not._

He’s going to ignore Shiro, and Shiro is going to go away, and Keith is going to forget all about how gentle his eyes were and how soft his voice was and how listening to him speak made his chest tingle all the way to his spine. And he’s definitely going to forget the gentle warmth that spread over his whole body when Shiro smiled at him.

Of course, the universe has other plans.

Keith does what he can to push him away, but then Shiro bails him out of juvie and offers him placement at the Garrison, and Keith is going to say no - he really is - but Shiro is so kind and he smells so good, and the need to be close to him is just too much to bear. It overrides his every instinct and comes to sit like a stone in the center of his chest, tied to Shiro’s presence like a string. Shiro is magnetic - where he goes, Keith finds himself following. He tries hard, and fails, not to become part of Shiro’s orbit.

It isn’t until later that he finally understands why.

He’s helping Shiro fix his hoverbike under the blaze of the desert sun one Wednesday afternoon. Shiro’s sweating, and Keith is pointedly not looking at the little beads of moisture trailing down his neck and into the hem of his shirt. What they have is still new and tender, and Keith hasn’t quite figured out how to talk to him yet, so they work in silence.

Keith sees it when Shiro rolls up his sleeves. A small, red mark, vaguely shaped like a flame if you squint, on his right inner forearm.

It’s Keith’s matching soul mark. It’s the same.

His stomach drops. He’s suddenly sweating for reasons other than the hot sun, and he knows he’s staring a little like a deer caught in the headlights, but he can’t help it. He can’t seem to look away. His own mark is suddenly burning, and he’s not sure if it’s his imagination or whether it’s a biological response.

No one told him it was going to be like this, so close and intense and overwhelming.

Shiro wipes his forehead on his arm, fixing Keith with a smile like pure sunlight.

Keith tugs the sleeve of his parka down to his wrist self-consciously and runs.

He doesn’t do relationships. He doesn’t do closeness and he doesn’t do love and he  _certainly_  doesn’t do soul marks. It’s too much, too big a risk. Soulmates aren’t fireproof. They don’t always work out, and Keith knows he’s not an easy person to get along with. He knows he’s not an easy person to love. The chance that everything could go up in flames is too big, and it’s a chance he isn’t willing to take.

So he buries his feelings in the deepest part of him, shoves them down until even the mark stops burning every time they meet.

Shiro becomes his mentor, and his best friend. They spend a year together - a long year of Keith patching holes in his walls as fast as Shiro chips away at them.

They race their hoverbikes in the desert and eat ice cream in the cafeteria at 2AM. They prank the high-ranking officers and run like hell when they nearly get caught, laughing with their hands on their knees, out of breath in the safety of Shiro’s quarters.

Shiro meets Adam and eventually they move in together, and it changes things, but not for Keith. He still sees Shiro every day and he still laughs at his horrible jokes and he still hides his soul mark carefully.

Once, Keith falls asleep on Shiro’s shoulder when they’re watching a movie. He wakes up in his own room, alone and wrapped in a blanket, and he’s never felt quite this kind of melancholy before. He doesn’t understand it, until he does:

He’s fallen in love.

Despite his best intentions, Shiro is his soul mate. He’s seventeen and he’s been fighting against this his whole life and now it’s too late - Adam’s proposed to Shiro and they look so happy together, and Keith’s world has ended just a little bit.

Sometimes, people don’t find their soulmates. Sometimes, they can be happy with someone with a different soul mark. It happens.

He’s happy for Shiro - he is - but behind it is only a vast sense of dismay. He feels too many things at once and he doesn’t know how to handle it, so he runs.

Shiro tries to follow. He doesn’t understand the sudden distance between them, why Keith doesn’t race with him anymore. He comes by Keith’s room a few times, and knocks, and waits. Keith never answers. He sits with his back against the door and hugs his knees tight, waiting for Shiro to leave. Wondering why he feels so miserable.

Keith still sees Shiro in the simulator sometimes, and each time he does he ducks behind the wall and presses his head back against it, heart racing and adrenaline spiking. Eventually, Shiro’s worried glances turn into frowns, and then he stops looking for Keith entirely.

And Keith wants, and he wants, and he wants.

Shiro’s disease gets worse, and then it gets better, and the doctors say they’re not sure how long he has left. Sam Holt tells him about Kerberos, and Shiro fights until they accept him on the mission.

He and Adam break up, and Keith breaks his rule only once, to tell Shiro he’s sorry it ended that way.

He means it.

Shiro goes to Kerberos.

He doesn’t come back.

The news broadcasts a photo of him and Sam and Matt, and the words “Pilot Error” burn afterimages into Keith’s lids. The space in his chest where Shiro used to be is suddenly empty and burning, and it crawls up into his throat like acid and burns through him almost too painfully to bear. His world ends in a huge, final way.

He doesn’t sleep that night, or the night after, or for a month after that. Instead, he sits on the Garrison roof and stares at the stars as if he could see all the way to Kerberos.

A week later, his soul mark disappears.

 

***

 

Keith’s been called stubborn more than once. He’ll be the first to admit it’s a character flaw, but it’s also something he’s come to appreciate about himself.

This, however, might be bordering on obsessive. Waiting for the dead to come back to life. Thing is? He  _knows_  Shiro isn’t dead. Keith’s soul mark might be gone, but he can still feel him. He can feel the bond right down in his deepest bones, thrumming through his mind with the inexorable and undeniable certainty that Shiro is alive.

Certainty, and regret. Since only he had been the one to see his matching soul mark, the bond remains half formed, only from Keith’s side. If only he had allowed Shiro to see his mark as well, it would have been complete, a proper bond. As it is, the feeling of connection is a vague and nebulous thing trembling in the back of his mind, weakened by distance.

Keith misses him. So much. He doesn’t like admitting how empty his days are without him. Before Kerberos, when he’d been pushing Shiro away, he could cope with it because at least Shiro was still there. He’d see him (run from him) every day, but his presence was like a visually reinforced tether that Keith was always aware of.

Now, there’s just nothing. A gaping hole in his life where Shiro used to be. And the only thing he has left is that threadbare string of their bond, one-sided and incomplete.

The pale spot on his arm where his mark used to be is a constant reminder. He traces where the outline of the little flame shape used to be over and over with his fingers. If your mark disappears, your soulmate is gone. There’s no escaping reality, and the reality of it is that Shiro is dead.

And yet, Keith looks at the stars and he can  _feel_  him.

It consumes him.

He drops out of the Garrison and starts gathering every bit of information on the Kerberos mission he can find. He doesn’t eat enough, and sleeps even less. His obsession with finding Shiro fills his days, and weeks, and months, and he doesn’t let himself think about anything else.

Eventually, he starts to fade. The days start to blur together. The only consistent thing left in his life is the unstoppable urge inside him to keep looking, until even that eventually starts to bleed out.

He finds the first sign on a Tuesday when he’s given up all hope. He knows it’s a Tuesday because Shiro left on a Tuesday, and it’s been exactly three months and three weeks since he’s seen him.

In one of the old Garrison archive records, one he’s read a thousand times before: a throwaway line about the magnetic fields around Kerberos being on the same frequency as those found in the deep caves in the desert, not far from where Keith lives.

Finding it is like feeling the sun rise on his life again.

After that, it goes faster: he starts finding more signs in the desert, weeks apart and then days, all leading to a time and a place and he doesn’t know what they’re for, only that they’re important.

A year to the day since his soul mark disappeared, a comet blazes through the sky and collides with Earth in a shower of fire and sand, and even if Keith hadn’t known it was coming he’d still have felt it - an electric shock, screaming through every bone in his body, “ _GO._ ”

He runs.

The Garrison is already there but it doesn’t matter. Nothing matters. Keith will tear it all apart with his bare hands if he has to because inside that tent, constrained and barely conscious but gloriously  _alive_ , is Shiro.

Of course it’s Shiro. Every sign he’s found, every long, sleepless night spent pouring over what they could mean, all of it has been leading him to this. He doesn’t even know how he knows it’s Shiro in there, only that he needs to get to him as soon as possible, and by any means necessary.

So he blows up a few things. He punches a few people.

And the moment he lays eyes on Shiro his arm flares with a searing pain, and he can feel the outlines of his soul mark etching themselves back into place. It’s a cleansing kind of burn, and it feels right in a way Keith hasn’t since the day Shiro disappeared.

And then Shiro is in his arms and Keith is slightly bewildered by how fast everything’s happened and why some other kids from the Garrison are there but it doesn’t matter. Nothing matters except the fact that Shiro is alive and here and his again.

They get him back to Keith’s shack somehow, and it’s late and they’re all exhausted, but Keith can’t sleep - not now that he’s got Shiro back.

Except…

Not all of Shiro came back. His arm is gone, replaced by cold metal and tiny pistons that hiss on the edge of hearing when he moves his fingers. It’s not human, and it’s not from Earth. Where the soul mark should be is only smooth silver and black seams. It’s gone, as Keith’s had been.

Keith covers the empty space with his palm and holds onto it until Shiro wakes up.

It’s close to dawn. Shiro doesn’t know where he is. “K…Keith?”

It’s as though Keith is able to hear sound for the first time in his life all over again.

“I’m here,” Keith says, close to tears with some nameless emotion that is too big to entirely fit into his veins, “I found you.”

“How?” Shiro’s voice is weak, but it’s the sweetest thing Keith’s heard.

He feels wetness on his cheeks as he slowly pushes up his sleeve, showing Shiro the soul mark. Recognition jolts through Shiro’s body like lightning. He grips Keith’s arm and sits up, staring at him in bewilderment. “You…”

Keith can only nod, the thousand things he’s wanted to say to Shiro over the past year getting stuck in his throat:  _I’m sorry I hid it from you_ and  _I love you so much_  and _I am incomplete without you_.

Shiro seems to understand anyway, by the way he clutches Keith to his chest. They stay that way for minutes, hours, Keith doesn’t know how long and he doesn’t care. The only thing that matters is that Shiro is here with him.

Except…

Shiro pushes him away to trace the soul mark, then drops his gaze to where the metal of his own forearm is still a clean slate.

“The bond…” he begins, and stops when Keith puts his hand over the empty space again.

“I know,” Keith says, trying to fill that space with words. Shiro looks downcast, his disappointment almost tangible through the half-bond.  

But no. Keith did not come all this way for a half-formed bond. He’s in it now, fully committed with the entirety of his stubbornness. Koganes never do things halfway. Struck by sudden inspiration, he reaches back for his knife. “Let me.”

Slowly, and so carefully, he takes hold of Shiro’s prosthetic forearm and carves their soul mark into its rightful place. He doesn’t stop to ask how his knife is able to scratch the alien metal, or worry about whether it’s hurting Shiro. Shiro is as still as stone, and anyway, Keith knows he wants this - needs this - as badly as he does.

He’s traced the shape of his own mark enough times to know it by heart. The moment is intimate, quiet, a simmering kind of burn between them. The whole world disappears as Keith works, and it’s only him and Shiro, finally, after so long, just the two of them.

Once the last line of the mark is finished, he feels the bond slot into place with a heavy kind of finality between them. He feels Shiro in his head, every part of him - all of his kindness and bravery, and all of his pain. And oh, his pain… Keith curls over into him, feeling every ache and scar like a phantom limb. It feels like Shiro is made of hurt, a kind of pain borne from survival that’s become such a big part of who Shiro is now that it’s indistinguishable from the rest of him.

Keith hates it. He hates the pain and whatever caused it, and he vows to destroy it. He opens himself, although he isn’t entirely sure how, and takes whatever he can of Shiro’s pain, just allows it to… kind of seep into him as far as it can and it hurts at first, hurts so badly he feels like screaming.

And then it ebbs, becomes a part of him, and as it lessens for him, he can feel it lessening for Shiro as well.

The heat of their connection spreads from the base of Keith’s skull, down his spine and right into his toes. From the way Shiro is gripping onto him and staring at him in wonder, he feels it too.

“…  _Oh._ ”

“You’re mine,” Keith whispers, staring up into Shiro’s eyes and wishing crazily that he could just somehow crawl right inside him, into that warm place where their bond is still pulsating between them. Into his home. “It’s you, Shiro. It’s always been you.”

“It’s like my whole world was black and white until now…” Shiro breathes, and they’re so close now that Keith can feel each word against his lips. “You’re all my colors, Keith.”

They kiss and it’s like stars colliding, like his whole body is suddenly made of effervescent sparks. Keith doesn’t know how he breathed before sharing Shiro’s breath. His world becomes more real somehow, a reality highlighted by a sense of rightness, of belonging. It’s desperate and hot and entirely too much all at once, and Keith’s soul mark burns with the pleasure of it.

Keith has never believed in soulmates. But as they kiss for what feels like forever, long into the night until the first blue light of dawn gently strokes their cheeks, he realizes he’s always believed in Shiro. And if Shiro just happens to be his soulmate?

Well, then, he just got lucky.

**Author's Note:**

> This is a birthday present for [taikodragon](https://archiveofourown.org/users/hana_ginkawa/pseuds/taikodragon), who likes soulmate AU fics. I hope I did this justice!!  
> I have never read or written soulmate AU before, and what little knowledge I have of it comes entirely from research. So I apologize if I got some things wrong!
> 
> ***
> 
> Follow me on [tumblr](https://narada-talis.tumblr.com) or [twitter](https://twitter.com/solooutomg) if you like!


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